Google has teamed up with the US space agency NASA to do space age research at a sprawling new campus at a former military air base in Silicon Valley, officials announced.

Google will build a one million-square-foot (92,903-square-meter) complex of offices and worker housing in the NASA Research Park at Moffett Field and join forces with National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists, according to Google.

"Our planned partnership presents an enormous range of potential benefits to the space program," said NASA Ames Center director Scott Hubbard.

Researchers will collaborate in areas including new materials, "bio-info-nano convergence, supercomputing, data mining, and bringing entrepreneurs into the space program," Hubbard said.

"Google and NASA share a common desire to bring a universe of information to people around the world," said Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt.

"Imagine having a wide selection of images from the Apollo space mission at your fingertips whenever you want it."

Google, deemed the top search engine on the Internet, will keep its current "Googleplex" headquarters a few minutes drive from the NASA Ames facility on a former Navy air base in the heart of Silicon Valley, according to the company.

The collaboration between NASA and Google will "couple some of the Earth's most powerful technology resources," officials from both operations said in a written release.

A "memorandum of understanding" signed by Google and NASA outlines areas of cooperation including large-scale data management and "massively distributed computing."